This is a disturbing blog post, as are some of the responses.
The post is reminiscent of a lecture I once attended where the
professor, who had just launched into his arguments against astrology,
suddenly remembered some important details of the upcoming exam that he
needed to impart to his students. As we all know, students fear exams
and this interruption by the professor perfectly illustrates how
students can be psychologically conditioned to associate astrology with
fears.

As I spoke to the students after the lecture it became
apparent that the struggling students who sat near the rear of the
lecture hall were the most at risk to being affected by those fears. The
professor in that case was a philosopher and as I spoke to him
afterward it quickly became evident that he was not aware of the
potential psychological harm he was inflicting on his students and he
apologized. He might simply have been passing on his own fears in much
the same way that he had learned those fears himself.

However, in
the present case Chris French is a psychology professor, and an excuse
of unintentional psychological manipulation on his part would be far
less convincing. Administrators at Goldsmiths, University of London,
should take note that French, in an article on "Astrologers," leads with
descriptions of abhorrent practices of ritual abuse, exorcism, racial
differences, devil worship, sexual perversion, human sacrifices, forced
abortions, and cannibalism. Considering the responsibility of his
position as a psychology professor, we should all question the ethics of
the way French has framed his arguments and whether he or his
department should receive funding to further this agenda.

The
arguments that French makes are far less serious than the way he has
packaged his delivery. They are the same tired old arguments that show
little knowledge or understanding of the discipline that he is trying to
refute. Astrologers generally do not claim that astrology works by
physical forces as he suggests. Where are the references? His opposition
to that view, which is not supported by astrologers, even conflicts
with Laplace's demon, which was typical of the mechanistic optimism of
the same period in early modern science from which French draws his
paradigm. His straw man argument even has its own internal problems.

If
French would study the literature, he would have to argue against the
"as above, so below" concept that has guided astrology from its
beginnings. There are countless symmetries in nature, from snowflakes,
to pine cones, to galaxies and quantum entanglement. It is a mystery why
nature prefers symmetry and astrology is part of the natural curiosity
of observing and attempting to correlate and understand that mystery.

Let's
hope that French's "anomalistic psychology" is indeed a psychological
anomaly as its name suggests and is not typical of the sort of ideas
that psychology or the public should accept as being ethically or
reasonably supportable.